My R Packages

Manang Languages Project
Documentation in Manang 2009 Gyalsumdo Dictionary Launch
Manang Languages Project Team Photo (2012) Working with Gurung Speakers (2009) Gyalsumdo Dictionary Release (2016)

I took my first linguistics courses as an undergraduate student at Keene State College, in Keene, NH.  I studied linguistics at the M.A. level at Arizona State University, where I was first exposed to more in-depth syntactic patterns found in languages outside of Indo-European (in particular, some of my early work was on Tohono O'odham, a Uto-Aztecan language of the southwestern U.S. and Mexico). I then continued with my studies at UC Santa Barbara, in the Department of Linguistics there.  I became deeply involved with documentation fieldwork on Sino-Tibetan languages of Nepal, in particular the Tamangic group of sister languages spoken in the Manang District there.  My dissertation involved a special focus on the phonetics and phonology of the four-way tone system of Manange (Nyeshangte), in particular as the acoustic variables of this complex system can vary across speakers in different contexts of bilingualism.  My passion for documentation and description of Tamangic languages continues to this day.


Upon my graduation in 2003, for two years, I was fortunate enough to be a part of the Word Domains Project (part of the larger Autotyp project on typology databasing) at the University of Leipzig as a post-doctoral associate.  From 2005-2008 I was a lecturer in the Linguistics and English Language Programme at the University of Manchester.  I am currently a faculty member in the Department of English Language and Literature at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.  You can check out the most current version of my C.V. for my activities in this area, and some of my publications, manuscripts (in pre-print format) and presentations are available for download as .pdf's.